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Tuesday, 24 September 2013

The quotative system, particularly in
teenage speech, has received a lot of attention from linguists in recent years
(for other summaries related to this topic click ‘Quotatives’ in the left-hand
bar). Much of the research has focused on the frequency rates and the
linguistic contexts in which reporting verbs such as SAY, GO and THINK are
used, with many studies focusing on the more recent newcomer BE LIKE, which has emerged among English
varieties across the globe.

A further competitor within the quotative
system, however, is the ‘zero’ or ‘null’ quotative, which is the focus of a
study by Ignacio M. Palacios
Martinez. These are instances where direct speech is introduced without the
use of any introductory verb or attributed speaker. Palacios Martínez provides
the following example where Speaker A introduces direct speech without any
introductory verb (Ø = zero quotative) but
the context and the mimicking voice provide Speaker B with the clue that these
are the words of the male protagonist of the film being discussed:

A:And
I’m gonna go and see Sommersby.

B:<unclear>

A: Sommersby
with Jodie Foster and Richard Gere.

B:Oh
yeah

A: <mimicking>
Ø ‘I’ve never loved anyone the way I love
you!’

Palacios Martínez compared the speech of
Spanish (mainly from Madrid) and English (mainly from London) teenagers from
similar social backgrounds and found that zero quotatives represented 8%
and around 18% respectively of all quotatives used, demonstrating that it is a
robust competitor within these quotative systems.

Furthermore, the Spanish and English
teenagers were found to use zero quotatives in similar ways. The first main context
identified as favoring the use of a zero quotative was when a sound or
non-lexicalised word was used, as in ‘grrr, grrr, grrr’ to provide a listener with
an animal sound when telling a story about a bear.

The second main use of zero quotatives was
connected with mimicking a voice (as in the above example) or performing in a
new voice, for example for dramatic or humorous effect. Within this category, Palacios
Martinez found that the teenagers imitated a wide variety of accents, including
African, Jamaican, Chinese, French and Swedish, usually done to criticize or
make fun of another person or to sound funny and make their interlocutor laugh.
The teenagers also emulated famous people or used voices typical of babies or
young children.

An interesting use of the zero quotative
was, as Palacios Martínez describes it, to express disgust and disagreement
with an interlocutor. He provides an example of a girl repeating a disagreement
that she had with a boy in her class about a football team, where she repeats what
the boy says and what she says in return but without the overt use of an
introductory verb in the case of either speaker.The fact that conflicting views are presented seems to make
it clear that different people are being represented in the narrative.

An interesting observation made by Palacios
Martínez is that the more involved a narrator becomes with his/her story and as
the story becomes more dramatic, the more likely is the use of explicit
quotatives to be abandoned and zero quotatives used. This is perhaps also
connected to the fact that as a story progresses the listener comes to know the
characters involved and there is not such a need for overt dialogue
introducers.

To conclude, Palacios Martínez argues that
zero quotatives play an important role in the speech of teenagers, particularly
in the construction of their narratives, suggesting that this may be connected
to the fact that teenagers are more prone to imitating and mimicking others
than adults. He argues that the lack of overt quotatives serves to make the
narrative account more fluid and thus also involves the interlocutor more
directly.

Monday, 16 September 2013

Summer Olympic Games have been called ‘sport mega-events’
due to their huge scale.They take place
in large capital cities and are generally considered as immensely important
occasions, for which massive security operations are mounted. Malcolm N.
MacDonald and Duncan Hunter were interested in investigating the language
used to describe the security operation surrounding the London 2012 Games and
to do this they considered the distinctive linguistic features used in Olympic
security documents.

They analysed 176 online documents from 11 UK institutes
involved in the security for the 2012 Games.They found that the Games were made to seem exceptional through certain
linguistic devices.For example,
superlative adjectives were often used to stress just how important and unique
the Games were:

The London 2012
Olympic Games and Paralympic Games will be the largest sporting event in
UK history … It will involve the biggest peacetime security operation
ever undertaken in the UK.

These adjectives give a very definite idea of sheer size and
scale.As well as this, they found that
a recurrent theme in the texts was the impact
the Games would have on different security sectors, such as

The Olympics are the biggest peacetime
operation … there will be an impact on policing during 2012’

The phrase ‘safety and
security’ was found to be used 132 times in just 12 texts. It seems to be
used emblematically to suggest the main goal of the security operation.For example:

The Government has
made safety and security at the Games a top priority …

The phrase occurs 254 times in the texts and is often found
with other words such as strategy,
programme, delivery and operation,
as evidenced in the following example:

… delivery of Games safety and security
compatible with the broader Games operation.

It is also used in its adjectival form ‘safe and secure’, usually in front of the word ‘Games’.The researchers surmised that the phrase is deliberately used to join
the positive connotations of ‘safety’ with the more problematic concept of
‘security’, making ‘security’ in turn seem more positive.The phrase was used so often in the texts
analysed, almost repetitively at times, that as well as stressing the necessity
of the conjoined concepts, they also appeared as ‘real’ rather than as abstract
concepts.

In the texts, prospective visitors to the Games were often
addressed directly in the second person (you)
and presented in a passive position, as just seeing things, whilst the security agents were much more ‘active’:

… you will see security measures
at and around the venues … We will use familiar methods that are
proven to work … you will see …security guards … who will all have a
role in security at the Games

Visitors are often ordered to do things in the texts, being
addressed with imperative verb forms as in

Aim to arrive
at the Olympic Park around two hours before… and Make sure you’re in your seat at least 30 minutes before… They
are generally spoken of as being somehow controlled.

The texts use the noun threat
very frequently, often along with the noun terrorist,
as in The greatest threat to the
security of the 2012 Olympic Games is terrorism.Interestingly, although all the texts incite
the fear of a threat, this is never actually attributed to a particular person
or group of people.Instead, it is
closely linked with the abstract notion of ‘terrorism’ in general.

MacDonald and Hunter feel that there is a political agenda
behind the use of language in the texts that they studied.Between 2001 and 2011 Europe and USA
experienced five major terrorist attacks. In consequence many documents have
been written which, although they are designed to allay the fear of a terrorist
attack, actually do the opposite by making the reader feel powerless before
this supposed ‘threat’ to an event that is presented as exceptionally
important.In the researchers’ eyes, this
provides an excuse to mount huge security operations in whichever major city
may be hosting the sporting event.They
conclude that such undemocratic, almost dictator–like behaviour, revealed
through language use, is actually anti-democratic and ironically goes against
the inclusive nature of the Olympic spirit.

Tuesday, 10 September 2013

The spread of English across the world has been viewed in
terms of three concentric circles, which are traditionally referred to as the Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles.The Inner
Circle (IC) refers to countries where English is viewed as a native
language, often considered the ‘traditional’ bases of English: the USA, UK,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Outer
Circle (OC) refers to countries to which English spread as a result of colonialism
such as India and parts of Asia and Africa. Here, English has been
institutionalised in educational, political and judicial systems and is a second language to many of its speakers.The Expanding
Circle (EC) is where English is a foreign language which is considered
important to learn in its international, business and digital capacity. As
English becomes more widely used in an international context, linguists have simultaneously
become more interested in documenting what is happening to variation in its
usage across the three circles.

One way of doing this is by studying the use of uncountable
nouns.These include advice, knowledge, milk and information and are traditionally
described as nouns that we literally can’t count and therefore have no -s to make them plural, as opposed to the
countable nouns chair(s), book(s), pen(s)
or apple(s) for example. The ‘incorrect’
use of these uncountable nouns has long been cited as one of the main
differences between native IC speakers of English and those in the OC and EC,
who have more of a tendency to pluralize them (as advices and milks for
example).

Christopher
Hall, Daniel
Schmidtke and Jamie Vickers decided to study this assumed distinction more
closely with a view to seeing whether there was any variation in uncountable
noun usage between the outer and expanding circles. To do this they extracted their data from two main
resources.The first was the Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English, or VOICE, a spoken language database
which contains just over one million words from non-native European English
speakers.The second was the World Wide
Web, a fantastic resource for research into international varieties of English,
especially as it’s full of ‘ill-formed’ language that prescriptive linguists
really don’t like, just perfect for this study! By using the advanced settings
of the Google search engine, Hall, Schmidtke and Vickers were able to search OC
domains like Malta (.mt) and Hong Kong (.hk) and EC domains like Thailand (.th)
and Iceland (.ic).They scoured both
VOICE and the WWW for examples of the ‘incorrect’ plural forms of uncountable
nouns.

They found that the pluralisation of mass nouns was actually
pretty uncommon, although obviously more frequent than native IC Englishes
where it is almost entirely absent.They
also found that where uncountable nouns were used in the plural form, it was
across a range of mainly OC settings.This was a curious finding since we would expect speakers in countries
where English is an official, widely-used second language to use it more ‘correctly’ or
at least more in line with native speakers of the IC.

However, the researchers deduced that it may
in fact be this notion of ‘correctness’ that is influencing the results.In EC settings, English is formally taught
and learnt as a foreign language and these speakers’ reliance on formal
language and grammar rules, something the researchers describe as their ‘post-learner
status’, could be directly influencing the results.

Hall, Schmidtke and Vickers are keen to point out that,
although frequent when compared to IC Englishes, plural forms of uncountable
nouns are unlikely to emerge as new forms in OC or EC Englishes as overall they
are quite infrequent, and this usage probably doesn’t warrant as much ‘fuss’
and attention as prescriptive linguists have given it in the past.

Nothing like some good researches to expand our knowledges,
don’t you think?

Tuesday, 3 September 2013

People often think that using
like as a discourse marker is typical of teenage
talk. Christopher V. Odato’s research, though, finds that children as young as
4 use like in this way.

Odato recorded children playing together, choosing one
pair of girls and one pair of boys in seven age groups – 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and
10. He identified three stages in their use of like as a discourse marker. At first (stage 1), children use like infrequently and in only a few
syntactic positions – mainly in front of a determiner phrase (beginning with a
word like a or the,as in she had like
a part right here) or at the beginning of a clause (like you deserve to get a spanking). As their language matures, they
reach stage 2. At this point they use like
more often and in a greater number of positions, though still more often before
a determiner phrase. By stage 3 their overall frequency of like has continued to increase and they now use it more frequently
in other positions, such as before a prepositional phrase (look at how mine landed like
in the crack of the chair).

Although boys and girls
follow similar developmental trajectories, Odato found that girls become more
sophisticated users of like at an earlier age than boys.All thegirls in the 4-6
year oldpairs used like, but only half the boys of the same age used it; and those
boys who did use like did so
infrequently. The girls moved from stage 1 to stage 2 at about the age of 5,
but the boys did not move on to stage 2 until they were 7. Girls showed a
dramatic increase in their use of like
between the ages of 4 and 6, but for boys a comparable increase in frequency was
not seen until the ages of 7 and 8. Finally, boys aged 7 and 8 were still
preferring to use like before a
determiner phrase, whereas the girls were using it less often in this position
and more often in a range of other positions.

Odato points out that
research on other discourse markers has also found that 4-7 year old girls use these
forms more frequently and with more global pragmatic functions than boys of the
same age. It’s been suggested that this is related to gender differences in
play: boys tend to prefer active games that do not require so much speech
whereas girls more often plot and act out pretend play situations.

Intriguingly, the different
syntactic positions in which children use like
as their ages increase follow approximately the same order as the historical
development of like as a discourse
marker in English. Odato points out, though, that the frequency with which
adults use like also coincides with
the history of the form. Children probably wait to hear enough evidence that like can be used in a certain syntactic
position before they start to use it that way themselves, and obviously this will
take longer for the less frequent positions. However what we know about adults’
use of like is based on adults
talking to adults, and we can’t assume that this is how adults use like when they are speaking to children.
As so often, more research is needed!

Odato, Christopher V. (2013) The
development of children’s use of discourse like in peer interaction. American
Speech 88(2): 117-143.

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